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Have you ever rolled your eyes at an industry-standard public relations report? Time after time, these reports show that a routine story on Yahoo or AOL or Forbes.com reached tens of millions of people when everyone knows it didn’t. If the story reached 60 million people, why was it only shared 8 times on Linkedin or Facebook?

As a Chief Marketing Officer in 2013, you are expected to measure everything. Whether it’s leads, pipeline, revenue, ROI, brand preference, awareness, or likes, if it can be quantified and tracked, it should be measured. But in most organizations, PR has been a frustrating exception.

The traditional public relations metrics are fatally flawed. Numbers like impressions, reach, and share of voice fail on three dimensions:

(1) They don’t take into consideration the content of the article: Was your company in the headline or just a brief mention at the end? Did they include a picture and a quote from a customer or just a mention of your name? Were your key messages pulled through? How many of your competitors were also mentioned?

(2) They don’t measure how many people read the article: Let’s say you receive a report from your PR firm that shows the impact of two articles that mentioned your company: one in the New York Times and the other on Yahoo news. The typical PR report will show that the New York Times story drove a couple of million “impressions.” The inclusion of the story on Yahoo News will likely show 60 million “impressions” based on the potential reach of Yahoo. The problem is that the real reach for both of these stories is much smaller than stated. In the case of the Yahoo story, the impressions are likely overstated by a factor of 10,000. That’s akin to saying that your company had a billion dollars in revenue when your true revenue was just $100,000. It’s a big mistake. Unfortunately, all of the industry standard metrics — reach, share of voice — are built on these faulty assumptions.

(3) They don’t measure how engaging the article was to your target audience: Some articles are so insightful and intellectually powerful that they create a new world narrative. Malcolm Gladwell’s original 1996 “The Tipping Point” article in the New Yorker is a perfect example. Most articles, however, are ignored and quickly forgotten. Most every PR report treats both types of articles the same.

“PR Sway”: A New Approach to Measurement

Over the last few months, I’ve developed and implemented a new way to track the value of an online PR mention by measuring quality and impact. The quality score is derived by answering three simple questions about the article. The Impact score is the total number of social shares on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Google+.

Here’s how it works:

Quality (%) x Impact (#) = PR Sway Score

More specifically:

To Calculate Quality: You answer three simple questions about the article:

What was the Tone of the article? [Strong Positive if the article is a positive portrayal (+100%), Medium Positive if positive and key messages are pulled through (+75%), neutral (+25%), Medium Negative (-75%), Strong Negative if a negative portrayal (-100%)]

To get the quality %, simply multiply the numbers associated with three answers together. So if the article was a positive portrayal of your company where you were mentioned in the headline without any competitors mentioned in the article than you would score 100% for quality (100% x 100% x 100% = 100%)

If you and a competitor were both mentioned in the first 5 paragraphs and the tone was neutral than you would score 4% for quality (25% x 20% x 80% = 4%). The result is an impartial, standardized view of power of the article to boost your product, company, or brand.

To Calculate Impact:

The impact score is super easy to calculate. I go to www.linktally.com and enter the URL of the article and calculate the social shares:

Calculating PR ROI with Social Shares

For this New York Times article, the total # of social shares is 6,127.

To Calculate PR Sway:

Simply multiply your quality percentage by the impact score. So, if your quality score was 100% then the PR Sway Score would be 6,127. If it was 4% than the score would be 245.

Let’s try it out by comparing three recent article on the Tesla Model S (Tesla Model S marketing was a subject of my last post — it was a surprisingly popular topic). Let’s pretend that we work for Tesla and we want to score four recent articles on the Tesla Model S:

As you can see from these examples, PR Sway Score provides a very simple way to score digital article on any product or company. If you’re looking at a report with hundreds or thousands of articles, it makes it easy to find the ones that are helping or hurting the most.

If you want to track PR like you track other business objectives, PR Sway lets you measure campaign effectiveness, set goals, and track performance over time. It helps you to better understand which media moves people to action. It makes it easy to calculate similar metrics for your competition and build a meaningful view of share of voice. Once you value a social share for your business, you can use the PR Sway Score to calculate PR ROI.

PR Sway, lIke any scoring methodology, is imperfect. The biggest gap is that it is only applicable to online content. Your article may have had a huge impact in print or you may have reached millions in a TV interview. While some readers or viewers may go online to find and share the article, your reach will inevitably be underrepresented. In my reporting, I add a multiplier to account for cross-media benefits but that too is imperfect.

That said, the reason that PR Sway Score works for me is that it models exactly what I am looking for: it tells me how many people were moved to take action by a story on my product or company and the proportion of the action that is likely to benefit our company. It lets the public vote on the value of the story and it provides a simple, standard way to look at large numbers of stories and identify what matters and what is simply noise.

While I respect any attempt to bring PR onto a rational footing, and while I like the attempt at a new formula, my sense is that you are only changing the variables in the equation-based approaches of which you are critical. Worse, in my opinion, you are applying a label (Sway) that reinforces the insubstantial nature of PR. Klout did the same and while successful as a business it is quickly unravelling because it does little more that propel the paradigm of connections, relationships, etc.

My answer is to look at the fundamentals of PR and other industries of influence. What I believe we are lacking is a framework that identifies the most basic organizing units of communications, sales, marketing, sales, etc. Without that, we are quite literally like chemists operating without a periodic table and we will continue to operate as untethered and generally poorly respected practitioners.

Happy to trade notes with you any time. Despite my criticism, I admire that you’re demanding alternatives and betting your own reputation in doing so.

Alan Kelly
Founder and Exec. Dir, Playmaker Systems, LLC
Author, The Elements of Influence
Adjunct Prof., The George Washington University

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